still, the glittering eyes were closed, and the long dark lashes lay
motionless upon the cheek,--the little face so strange and terrible
in its sudden, peaceful beauty.

As Teddy softly entered, Dr. Wentworth turned and held a warning
finger up; then bent again above the little child, his hand upon her
heart.

The boy crept close to his mother, down whose honest face the tears
ran like rain; although she heeded the earnest warning of the
physician, and was almost as still as she little form she watched.

"Is she dead, mother?" whispered Teddy.

"Whisht, darlint! wait till we know," whispered she in return; and
the young doctor glanced impatiently at both out of his strained and
eager eyes. Had it been his own and only child, he could not have
hung more earnestly about her: and here was the strange, sweet charm
of this little life,--that all who came within its influence felt
themselves drawn toward it, and opened wide their hearts to allow
its entrance; feeling not alone that they loved the lovely child,
but that she was or should be their very own, to cherish and fondle
and bind to them forever.

So the coarse, hard-working woman, who two weeks before had never
seen her face, now wept as true and bitter tears as she had done
beside the death-bed of the child she had lost when Teddy was a
baby; and the young doctor, who had watched the passage of a hundred
souls from time to eternity, hung over this little dying form as if
all life for him were held within it, and to lose it were to lose